OCLC Americas Regional Council to hold its first meeting at ALA Midwinter 2010

Plan now to join OCLC for the first meeting of the OCLC Americas Regional Council, which will be held on Friday, January 15, 2010, 8:30 – 11:30 am (ET), in conjunction with the American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Meeting in Boston, Massachusetts.

The meeting location, agenda and online registration details will be announced in the next few weeks. (If you will be unable to attend in-person, please watch for details on how you can view portions of the meeting that will be broadcast live on the Web.)

The Americas Regional Council meeting will provide an open forum to discuss issues of importance to its members and to advise OCLC about its products, services, policies and operating direction. The Americas Regional Council Executive Committee, members of OCLC Board of Trustees, Global Council and OCLC Management will be present for interactive discussions. Bring your ideas and be ready to participate.

Comprised of members from libraries and other cultural heritage organizations from Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean and the United States, The Americas Regional Council is part of the OCLC cooperative’s new governance structure that consists of three Regional Councils and a Global Council to facilitate member-to-member discussions across the cooperative.

Remember, every member has a voice! The Americas Regional Council is interested in what you have to say. Plan now to make this meeting a part of your ALA Midwinter experience.

If you have questions about the meeting or the Americas Regional Council, please contact Patrick Wilkinson, the Chair of the Americas Regional Council at wilkinso@UWOSH.EDU. Learn more about OCLC Global Council and the three Regional Councils.

(reposted from OCLC email list)

Technical services consolidation a possibility in Massachusetts college libraries

Leonard Kniffel reports in American Libraries on efforts that are underway to consolidate the technical services operations of five Massachusetts college libraries: Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Since the Sept. 29 release of a Technical Services Consolidation Task Force report, a decision has been made to study the issues further, based on reactions to the report. Jay Schafer, director of libraries at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, maintains that “consolidating these services is a difficult task and impacts many layers in our libraries and our organizations, but we’ve been talking about this for a couple of years. It’s not easy, but it’s something that we have to explore.”

2010 NISO Education Schedule

2010 NISO Education Schedule and Discount Program 

Building on the success of its 2009 educational programs, NISO will be hosting 16 educational events throughout the coming year—13 webinars and three in-person events—focusing on a range of  technology- and standards-related topics affecting the library and publishing communities. Among the important topics that will be addressed are: assessment, interoperability, preservation, identification, RFID, metadata, and accessibility. 

NISO is also pleased to announce a discount program for organizations interested in having staff participate in multiple events. The entire 12-part series of webinars can be purchased for the price of six events. There is also a "buy 4 and get 2 free" discount. This is an excellent opportunity for professional development without the expense of travel. 

NISO's web seminars are held on the second Wednesday of each month, except July, from 1:00 - 2:30 p.m. (Eastern Time). There are two 2-part seminars planned for March and September, which will take place on consecutive Wednesdays. 

NISO will hold three in-person forums in 2010: Discovery to Delivery: Creating a First-Class User Experience (March 23rd in Atlanta, GA); The 4th Annual NISO/BISG Changing Standards Landscape Forum (free, open event at ALA Annual, June 25th, Washington, DC); and E-Resource Management: From Start to Finish (and Back Again) (October 7th, Chicago, IL). NISO educational forums are routinely praised for their excellent selection of speakers representing a diversity of viewpoints across the scholarly information community and the small size that provides opportunities to network with speakers and other attendees. 

Free teleconferences are also held on the second Monday of every month (except July) to discuss projects underway in NISO and to provide the community with an opportunity to provide feedback and input on areas where NISO is or ought to be engaged. 

The complete list of 2010 NISO educational events is available on the NISO website. Registration is now open for all events.

(http://www.niso.org/publications/newsline/2009/newslinenov09.html#report3)

SirsiDynix VP of Innovation Stephen Abram fires a shot over the bow of open source ILSs

Stephen Abram, VP of Innovation for SirsiDynix, has written a paper called "Integrated Library System Platforms on Open Source" in which he "set[s] out to clarify what open source is, how it is different from proprietary software platforms, and why Integrated Library Systems (ILS) are not ready for open source at this point." Accused of spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt, Abram defends the report on his blog, saying, "I call it critical thinking and constructive debate—something that everyone in libraries should embrace and engage in."

For a good overview of the controversy, see Josh Hadro's article in Library Journal: "SirsiDynix Report on Open Source: Promoting Debate or Sowing Fear?"

Digital Preservation: "This is how the world ends, not with a bang but an error message"

NDIIPP Partners Play Major Role at iPRES 2009

October 29, 2009 -- The 2009 International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects was held in San Francisco, CA, October 5 and 6. The California Digital Library, a National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program partner, hosted the meeting, which brought together digital-preservation researchers and practitioners from 70 universities and 33 national libraries, as well as a variety of other interested parties.

Martha Anderson, NDIIPP Director of Program Management, gave a keynote address that focused on the growth of the NDIIPP distributed collaborative effort. She announced intent to develop a National Digital Stewardship Alliance with a goal of enabling collaboration across institutional, industrial and state boundaries while encouraging diverse solutions.

The financial cost of digital preservation received particular attention during the conference. A panel session considered the work of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access and all the speakers were united on the need for increasing financial incentives and reducing economic risk. They also agreed that digital preservation projects must be well-justified to receive financial support.

In a panel session, Martha Anderson said that Congress understands digital preservation but they have limited resources to allocate. They want to see the immediate impact of their investment rather than promises for results at a distant point in time. Another panelist, Paul Courant, the University Librarian and Dean of Libraries at the University of Michigan, said that the academic world needed to collaborate in addressing the digital preservation challenge. Anderson echoed the shared-work solution as a practical strategy; later, in another panel session, Anderson called attention to the success of the MetaArchive cooperative, who has distributed stewardship of their content at a relatively low cost.

The panel also suggested that a tax credit or write-off might be an incentive for individuals or corporations to preserve their digital collections. Other sessions during the conference -- such as "Predicting Long Term Preservation Costs" and "Cost Model for Digital Preservation: Cost of Digital Migration" -- also addressed economic sustainability issues.

There were several other presentations about other projects in which the Library is involved: keynote speaker David Kirsch of the University of Maryland talked about preserving the digital records of corporations; Henry Lowood of Stanford University talked about preserving virtual worlds (and included the memorable quote, "This is how the world ends, not with a bang but an error message"); Ardys Kozbial discussed the Chronopolis project and Rebecca Guenther spoke on best practices for expressing preservation metadata.

(http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/news/2009/20091029news_article_iPRES.html)

December webinar: The Potential of Partnerships: Dissolving Silos for a Successful IR Implementation

The Potential of Partnerships: Dissolving Silos for a Successful IR Implementation

Presented by Marilyn Billings

Wednesday, December 16 at 2pm Eastern (11am Pacific; noon Mountain; 1pm Central)

Click Here to Register

This webinar will use the University of Massachusetts’ institutional repository as a case study to explore how the new digital repository service has affected the way librarians envision our place in the future of the academy, how the academy is changing its view of the library’s role, new tools and skills that we are developing to fulfill this service, and new partnerships that we have created and fostered to exploit this new vision. We hope to foster discussion and provide insights and opportunities for further exploration of how the role of libraries as publishers enables us to be key partners in the creation, dissemination, and archiving of academic scholarship.

Marilyn Billings (mbillings@library.umass.edu) is the Scholarly Communication & Special Initiatives Librarian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She provides campus-wide leadership and education in alternative scholarly communication strategies and is frequently an invited speaker at faculty department colloquia. 

(http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/alcts/confevents/upcoming/webinar/ir_series.cfm#7)

Upcoming ALCTS webinar: Bringing Research Data into the Library: Expanding the Horizons of Institutional Repositories

Upcoming ALCTS webinar:  

Bringing Research Data into the Library: Expanding the Horizons of Institutional Repositories 

Presented by MacKenzie Smith 

Tuesday, November 10 at 2pm Eastern (11am Pacific; noon Mountain; 1pm Central) 

Click Here to Register 

The focus of Library-managed Institutional Repositories has so far been on document-like items (published articles, preprints, theses, reports, working papers, etc.) but there is growing demand to expand their use into new genres such as scientific research datasets (sensor readings, genomics data, neuroimages,etc.). The presentation will explain how IRs are including this type of collection, what librarians need to know in order to manage such collections, and a few case studies from the MIT Libraries. 

MacKenzie Smith (kenzie@mit.edu) is the Associate Director for Technology at the MIT Libraries, where she oversees the Libraries' technology strategy and its digital library research and development program. 

(http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/alcts/confevents/upcoming/webinar/ir_series.cfm#6)